The arrangement of characters on a document often communicates important information about the information conveyed by the characters. For example, characters may be arranged in one or more fields about a document, where each field conveys certain information, such as names, dates, or account numbers. Irregularities in the document that affect the position of the characters, such as text that is misaligned with the document or character size or spacing that is inconsistent with the field boundaries, can cause characters intended for a particular field to reside at least partially outside of the field. When automated character recognition is performed on the document, the characters may not be properly grouped into their intended fields. As a result, the information conveyed by the document may be unusable without further formatting. To improve the efficiency of automated character recognition, it is desirable to improve the ability of the automated character recognition system to account for irregularities in a document that affect the position of the characters relative to the expected location of fields.